AND KAYAK 87 



about our ears in a very wet and chilly heap. 

 Such a mishap with a snow house I never had ; 

 and the credit, I think, must be given to those 

 two faithful Eskimos, for my drivers had the 

 name of being two of the very finest builders 

 on the whole coast. But I met a missionary 

 in Labrador who had sat in a snow house for 

 two whole days while a blizzard roared out 

 side. Neither he nor his drivers dared to go 

 outside, for nobody could stand against the 

 terrible wind, and there was nothing to hear 

 but the roar of it and nothing to see but the 

 whirling snow. So there they sat, the three 

 of them, while the blizzard blew. And 

 gradually the wind ate away the wall of snow, 

 making it thinner and thinner, until all of a 

 sudden, with a roar and a swoop, the snow 

 house fell to pieces and was scattered in a 

 million fragments by the storm. The travellers 

 scraped for themselves a hole in the snow, and 

 there they lay, perishing with the cold and 

 half buried by the drift, until happily the wind 

 grew less, and they were able to gather their 

 dogs together out of the snow and so go on 

 with their journey. Sometimes on a windy 

 day my drivers would say to me, &quot; Blizzard 

 to-morrow, maybe,&quot; and they would set to 

 work and build a wall of snow around the 

 windy side of our snow house, and the blizzard 



